


burning wishes at both ends (the cold wind and long loud wail remix)

by AlexSeanchai



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Emilie Agreste Lives, F/M, Remix, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-14
Updated: 2020-10-14
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:01:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26744071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlexSeanchai/pseuds/AlexSeanchai
Summary: Whatever mistakes Gabriel Agreste may have made or tried to unmake, Émilie does not know of them. Only that her son is making mistakes right now.
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir & Emilie Agreste & Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth, Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, Emilie Agreste/Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth
Comments: 14
Kudos: 176
Collections: Remix Revival 2020 Madness





	burning wishes at both ends (the cold wind and long loud wail remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Burning the Monkey's Paw](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20083318) by [x_los](https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los). 
  * In response to a prompt by [x_los](https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los) in the [remixmadness2020](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/remixmadness2020) collection. 



> > My candle burns at both ends;  
>  It will not last the night;  
>  But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—  
>  It gives a lovely light!
>> 
>> —"First Fig", Edna St. Vincent Millay
> 
> "Burning the Monkey's Paw" was posted before "Reflekdoll" aired, and I am altering significant canonical details here to suit that fic.
> 
> Thanks to htbthomas for betaing!

Someone's sobbing.

Her son, thinks Émilie, through fog. The sound is deeper, harsher, than she's heard in over a decade: Adrien hasn't truly wept since he was barely toddling. Something must have gone wrong. Something _went_ wrong—is Adrien hurt? is Gabriel? where are Nathalie, and Simeon, that Adrien is who found— _Émilie_ is hurt! Adrien has never seen Émilie hurt, not to know it: of _course_ he's worried and frightened and—devastated, like his whole world has shattered underfoot—

But she's alive. Whatever happened—and oh, God, she hurts, good God it's hard to move or breathe: how close did she come to dying?—whatever they did wrong, Émilie is alive.

Adrien may not know that. She feels no fingers at her throat or wrist, hears no sound but his grief, meters away—if _she_ is this badly off, what about Gabriel? what will happen to Adrien? thirteen is too young to lose a parent— She breathes her son's name.

"Maman?" whispers a man.

What?

Émilie opens her eyes. Whatever she's lying on, it's angled to show her the former cathedral where she and Gabriel were experimenting, where a kneeling young man's golden head whips around to the slim red-clad figure sprawled unnaturally on the shadowed moss. Pink light flares over the still form: pink capris, pink ballet slippers, that's all Émilie can see of her: that and how his shoulders tremble and sag, how the strength plainly visible under that black leather means nothing to him now. Adrien's loud, ragged breathing is his.

"Adrien," says Gabriel. Quiet, almost careful, almost hesitant.

Émilie's son looks up, past Émilie—what monstrous eyes! and those cat ears seem alive—and when she turns her head, yes, it's Gabriel standing there, face cowled and sword in each hand and the Butterfly Miraculous at his throat. The sheathed sword-cane is familiar, but the other? Absurdly large, like many in one or another anime Adrien loves; red with black polka dots and keen black edges and bubbling opalescent black and green glow—

The Ladybug and Black Cat Miraculouses are _lost_.

"Adrien," repeats Gabriel. "I wouldn't change anything. Not anything."

Adrien's glare hardens. What—what _happened_ , that Gabriel thinks to say this is kindness, and Adrien hears only cruelty?

—Gabriel's raising the sword—turning it on _himself_ —

"NO!"

Her scream distracts Gabriel. Only a moment, but it's enough: Adrien punches the sword from his father's hand with the silver staff in his own. A sweep of the staff knocks Gabriel flat and sends the sword-cane flying; three paces brings Adrien to his father's side; one foot planted on his stomach pins Gabriel to the ground.

"No," whispers Adrien, with glacial fury. "You don't get out of this that easy."

"Adrien?" tries Émilie again, bracing one elbow to push herself up. She's starting to cry herself now: whoever the girl in pink is to him, whatever happened to her, this has hurt her son past bearing. "What's happening?"

He glances at her, his mouth a flat hard line, and returns his attention to Gabriel. With the staff he knocks the Butterfly pin through the air, arcing to land by the girl, and slams its butt on the wrist of Gabriel's closed hand as the light flashes his jacket sleeve from magical purple to mundane white; Émilie hears the bones crack. Adrien leans down to collect whatever Gabriel was holding, and only then looks at his father's face. He snorts. "I should have known."

Émilie gathers all her maternal authority: "Adrien! Stop!"

Adrien flicks her another silent glance, shrinking the staff in his hand to a baton at his back and dropping the improbable sword by the girl's side.

"My son," says Gabriel, pleading—pleading? he has only once lowered himself so much—"I can make this right. Let me make this _right_."

The girl's purse is soft pink with black embroidery: a five-petaled flower and a monogrammed M. Adrien sets it back down, considers for a moment her phone, and swipes one knuckle around the screen. "I'm sharing our location," he says, sharp crisp words, setting the phone on the moss by the girl's—M's?—thigh. "Meet Tikki and Ryūko at the bakery—tell Ryūko that first—then come find us. Is your girl there?"

Getting out of this (worryingly coffin-like) contraption is harder than it looks. Émilie thumps to the floor, twisting an ankle and breaking branches from the nearest bush. "Gabriel," she begs, catching her breath. "Help me."

He hears her. He must. But her husband's eyes stay on their son, his jaw clenched.

"Excellent question!" snaps Adrien. "I wonder who the owner of this phone might know who likes swords?" A moment; a sound of tearing fabric. "Up to you," he says. "It's—" He sighs, his tone losing its anger. "You'll hate this scoop."

Émilie glances at Gabriel one more time: he's sitting up, cradling his broken wrist against his chest, and making no move to stand. Something flickers at the corner of Émilie's eye—Duusu? No, nothing, it was red if it was there at all. _Was_ it there at all? The Ladybug kwami is probably red…

Adrien has three Miraculouses in his possession, Émilie thinks, or four if the other thing he took was the Peacock brooch, and everything he has said so far is at least one of nonsensical and dangerous. Whatever force compelled Gabriel to attempt to kill himself, though, Adrien protected his father. He'll protect his mother, too, she concludes, beginning to crawl toward him and toward M. Even though he doesn't seem to want her help or to help her; even if it has been—God, how long? How many years transformed the cheerful boy she remembers into this tormented, dangerous man?—even so, Émilie can steal one of the Miraculouses, or that sword, and he will not hurt her for it.

"I hear your boy has a hit list," Adrien says, bitterly amused. "His best friend's father, my father, and Hawkmoth. In no particular order." He pauses two heartbeats. "Yeah. No one is allowed to kill him. That ought to please his wife," Adrien adds. "Especially if they both behave."

Gabriel's head snaps up; Émilie freezes.

"You heard me," Adrien says, and though he still isn't looking at either of his parents, the words chill her. The words of a man whose name she chose to forget chilled her just like that, eight years ago—no. Eight years before the last time Émilie saw her son.

She and Gabriel saved Adrien then, Émilie reminds herself. The little girl that man described, Adrien's playmate with the black ponytail and the pink denim polka-dot dress, was never truly in danger—her family had nothing he wanted—but had she been, Émilie and Gabriel would have saved her too. She and Gabriel can save Adrien now—both Adrien and this girl with black pigtails and gray blazer.

"I'm sorry," Adrien says, his shoulders slumping. "Tell her parents I am so very sorry." He hangs up. The phone dents the metal near where Émilie's head was and falls to the ground.

"Adrien," Gabriel says again. "We can fix this."

"You knew there would be a price," Adrien says, without emotion, without lifting his hand from M's. She hasn't moved, Émilie realizes. She hasn't moved so much as a breath since Émilie woke. He says, "Ladybug told you there would be a price."

"I didn't know—"

"The hell you didn't," Adrien says. The phone he threw is perhaps three meters from Émilie. "You could have wished for a banana split at the cost of her life and thought it cheap at twice the price. We've known that for years."

"I would never—"

"Wouldn't you?" Adrien asks, attention on M and on Gabriel and not on Émilie or the phone. "I knew we could never let you get what you wanted by two days in, just from how you chose to ask about it. I knew that before I knew I was falling in love with her. Imagine," Adrien adds, tone twisting from a moment from dull to wry, "my not loving Ladybug."

"I wanted your mother back!" Gabriel shouts. "You should understand that! You, of all people, should understand that!"

Adrien stills. He glances toward Émilie— "Oh, just go get the phone," he says, utterly exasperated. "You won't be able to call anyone but emergency services, but don't let me stop you from calling emergency services. Tell them whatever the fuck you like. Tell them a madman's threatening your life to ensure your and your husband's cooperation, for all I care." The corner of his mouth twists up: "It's even true."

"You wouldn't _dare_ —"

Adrien snorts, cutting Gabriel off. "Left ear," he says, and hurls his baton at Émilie—she ducks with a yelp: it would have taken her ear off, she thinks, shivering, but— _ouch!_

Adrien catches the baton. (Did he bounce it off the cathedral wall?) "Sometime in the past five years," he says, voice cool, "everyone who was ever going to mourn Émilie Agreste did." Émilie touches the left side of her face; sharper pain sparks, and her fingertips come away bloody. "Ladybug never wanted your husband dead. Most of the rest of Paris probably does," he muses, "and possibly much of the world, but Ladybug, never."

What did Gabriel _do_?

Nothing, that Émilie can be certain of. Even the girl lying dead at her son's feet—Adrien blames him, it seems, but he may be mistaken. And what Émilie knows Adrien has done—

Adrien could have killed her, just now. He did injure her. He said in so many words that he still might kill her.

"Your husband may truly believe his death is a just price," Adrien continues, "but I am certain my lady disagrees." To Gabriel, sharp again, he says "Tell me—when did you decide you disliked the price tag on this wish? Was it when you heard your son's grief, or only when you realized your wife knows who _caused_ that grief?"

The phone's in Émilie's hand now. She stares at the screen: there must be a way to call Nathalie. Miraculous secrets should remain secret, and if Émilie calls emergency services, they won't.

"I never wanted this for you, my son." Gabriel's almost crying now.

"I wanted to marry her," Adrien says, beginning to rearrange M's limbs to a more natural position, fresh tears starting down his cheeks. Émilie isn't entirely sure he heard Gabriel speak.

Unlocking the phone so she can call Nathalie doesn't seem possible when she doesn't know the right code. And calling emergency services might well not do anyone any good: not when someone who, by his own admission, is a hostage-taking madman is encouraging Émilie to do exactly that.

"I almost had her convinced, I think," Adrien murmurs. "We were both in love with other people, I thought, but we could have gotten an apartment and split the cooking and started a business, and been each other's next of kin, and never have had to worry about upsetting our parents or getting fired when our actual profession interfered with our jobs. Maybe I did have her convinced. She turns—she was turning eighteen next month—that might be all she was waiting for. I don't know." He huffs, running gloved fingers along M's forearm. "Guess I never will."

"It doesn't have to be this way," begs Gabriel, with what Émilie thinks is meant to be a significant look. "We can bring her back. Sacrifice me—"

"Oh, do you know the price tag this time?" Adrien's tone is almost light, almost idle. "This isn't just you trying to dodge the consequences? You could have just kept your filthy thieving fingers off of my ring and off of her, you know. I kept telling her to slow down and get some rest," he says, more toward Émilie. "Both of her. Do you know what she told me?"

No, but Émilie has an awful suspicion. "Let me guess: she would sleep when she was dead?" —His ring, he said?

Adrien half smiles. "Well isn't this convenient."

What on God's green earth has been _happening_ the past five years that her son has become _this_?

"So you _want_ her dead," says Gabriel, his tone abruptly, cruelly pleased.

Adrien's expression turns stony. Émilie wants to rush to comfort her son, as she often has—but _how_ , when that expression says Gabriel, however unkind, is _right_?

He wanted to marry the girl, though. That matters. "Tell me about her," Émilie suggests.

Adrien shakes his head. "You would have loved her."

A long silence. Émilie doesn't know how else to prompt him to speak: to tell her anything that will help her figure him out, or at least delay until—but the only people who might know where they are are Adrien's friends. Until Émilie calls Nathalie, since she must not yet know.

She might be able to save him from himself if she begins by going to embrace him now?

—Ow!

"If you want to get out of here faster, call emergency services," Adrien tells her, almost mild, almost as though he didn't just smash his staff over her leg. "Don't try to leave, and _don't_ try to get close to me or to her. We get a little twitchy about people in our personal space. It comes from having supervillains trying to rip the jewelry off our persons nine times a week."

Émilie glares at her son; she's starting to cry on her own account now. Her shin bone isn't broken—she doesn't think—but he was…he meant that, didn't he. He really is willing to hurt her. "What did I do to deserve this?" she asks.

"No more than Paris did." Adrien doesn't glance toward Gabriel. "What that was, you'll have to ask your husband."

Something chimes. Adrien takes the baton off his back, slides part of it open, says "Hey" as though it's another phone. It might be, but how odd, for a millennia-old object that only rarely exists to have a phone number. "Underground, I guess. I lost track for a bit." A pause. "Oh good, a stroke of luck." Adrien sounds viciously bitter. "Two meters from me. Pick a direction, you won't land on anything." He snaps the baton closed. "Our ride's almost here."

"They'll hate you," Gabriel says, cold and cruel as Émilie has never heard before. "Paris will despise the man who refused to aid their heroine."

"Do you know where I learned to put the woman I love before everything else, even family?" Adrien flips the baton around in his hand and hurls it, ruffling Émilie's hair; it clangs off the cathedral wall and back (she thinks, her face in the moss) into his hand. "I learned," Adrien says, lethally sharp, "from the _best_."

Something starts chirping; aqua light flares. Émilie rolls over, shading her eyes. The first person through what must be a portal is a young man, the Turtle wielder, judging by the shield on his arm; he surveys the room, nods, and sticks his other arm back through for a moment. The Turtle is already hauling Gabriel up by one wrist behind Gabriel's back and one elbow when two young women enter: one wearing red-black-gold and a four-horned mask, steely-eyed and holding a longsword ready; the other bare-faced in blue jeans and plaid flannel, clapping one hand to her mouth at the sight of Adrien and the dead girl, shaking her head, almost dropping her phone. The swordswoman, whichever Miraculous that is, eyes Gabriel. "Chat Noir," she asks, "why are we not permitted to kill him?"

Adrien strips the ring from his finger; the black leather-like magic fades in favor of black denim and what by its art style must be a Pokémon tee. ("Ledyba, of course," mutters the woman without a Miraculous.) The Cat kwami settles on Adrien's shoulder. Émilie has not, she realizes, seen Duusu, or Nooroo, or the Ladybug kwami—

"Ladybug never expected that justice for Hawkmoth's wrongdoing would mean his death. It might," Adrien muses, contemplating the ring he's holding and getting slowly to his feet. "Some of his crimes against humanity have been global, and the United States is both an uncivilized enough nation to still have the death penalty and a powerful enough nation that, if they tried to have him extradited to stand trial there, they might succeed." He takes a couple of steps and holds the ring out to the woman without a Miraculous, who is holding her phone as though panning the camera around the room; the woman doesn't move to take it. "But Ladybug never wanted Hawkmoth dead." He snickers, though it hardly sounds amused, and drops the ring in the pocket of the woman's unbuttoned button-down, and turns back to where Ladybug's body lies. "That would be me.

"I don't know whether Hawkmoth knew resurrecting his wife would come at the cost of killing anyone else." Adrien is gathering Ladybug into his arms now. "If he knew, I don't know whether he believed it, or cared. I don't even think he cared when he realized he had just caused the same pain to his son that he has been trying for five years to undo for himself—after all, why would he care? His son is one of the people he's been torturing."

Émilie gasps.

No one else seems surprised.

Adrien rises again, this time with Ladybug cradled against his heart. "No, I think the reason he now has regrets is Émilie Agreste realized some of what he has done." His eyes are human-shaped now, with whites again, but their almost-acid green glow burns Émilie's heart. "And she will surely learn the rest."

Émilie swallows and nods.

"But no amount of anger, tears, or disappointed expressions will matter to a gravestone," Adrien continues to the camera. "Which he knew when he tried to die."

"So both justice and compassion mean Gabriel Agreste must live," says the woman filming.

"Yeah, Alya. Something like that." Adrien jerks his head at first the Turtle wielder and Gabriel, then the portal. "Ladybug values justice over her own life. My petty little revenge of making him live with what he's done is entirely secondary."

The Turtle wielder winces. "Therapy," he mutters, then shoves Gabriel and himself through the portal.

"Do you need assistance?" the other wielder asks. It takes a moment for Émilie to realize she's asking her. In Émilie's defense (she thinks, getting slowly to her feet unaided), the garnet-red sword is long, sharp, and off-putting: more so than Gabriel's sword-cane (vanished no doubt when Adrien stole the Butterfly pin), if less so than—

"Ryūko, destroy that," Adrien adds, with a pointed glance at the sword on the ground. The one that's red with black spots, like ladybugs, and glowing black and acid green.

The Ladybug and Black Cat Miraculouses, when used together—

Émilie lunges for the sword.

"Thunder Dragon!" she hears.

 _I wish for this girl to live, and my husband to die,_ she thinks, in the moment that her palm lands on the flat of the blade. _So that my son may be happy._

Her momentum carries her forward. The corpse Adrien carries seizes and draws breath. Lightning crashes down on the sword.

"What—" A woman's voice.

"Mother _fucker_ ," mutters Adrien, and starts laughing, in the uncontrollable way that will end in tears. "You're okay. You're okay. My lady, it's all right, we won, you're okay—"

"Are you?" asks the woman. M. Ladybug.

"Ask me again when we've slept for a week or two," Adrien manages. "And had a couple more meltdowns."

"Vacation," she says, voice longing. "We'll be okay, kitty, I promise."

"What just happened?" asks the woman filming.

The Dragon wielder says, "It sounds as though Madame Agreste is on her husband's side."

Émilie sprawls on the moss, and stares at the damp ceiling, and thinks _I just killed my husband._

When the Dragon wielder picks her up, Émilie doesn't protest, only watches as her son reclaims his ring from his friend with the camera, as the Turtle wielder reappears through the portal to hand her future daughter-in-law a pair of earrings. On the far side, an ambulance is zooming away, sirens wailing, from where Émilie sits at the corner of Place des Vosges across from the bakery. Right there, in the very place where Adrien and a friend he'd never seen again once played, unaware of the danger on the far end of Adrien's mother's phone call, a bronze statue of two teenage Miraculous wielders now stands. The baker himself and his wife watch the glowing portal a moment longer, clinging to each other with heartbreak in both their eyes, only to shout in disbelieving joy when the young woman in Ladybug red exits on her own two feet, when she and Émilie's son hurtle into Ladybug's parents' embrace and break down in tears.

**Author's Note:**

> Credit where due: one of those lines is inspired by [a short comic by hamsternamedmarinette](https://hamsternamedmarinette.tumblr.com/post/623213631018008576/whos-gonna-tell-him).  
> 
> 
> [My comment policy](https://alexseanchai.tumblr.com/post/612627045048008704/as-a-fic-writer-i-need-every-reader-to-know): tl;dr happy comments make me happy. So do thinky comments, of course, but there exist jerks who think only thinky comments are worth anyone leaving.
> 
> Find me on [Dreamwidth](https://alexseanchai.dreamwidth.org/) and [Tumblr](https://alexseanchai.tumblr.com/).


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